Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
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Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Benedict XVI vs. the demi-Pelagians, Part II--Politics

Today's ZENIT posts Part II of an interview with Tracey Rowland, and Australian theologian. In this part, Rowland explores the nature of modernity and how Benedict XVI might characterize it vis-a-vis the Church.

Is liberalism a positive and "liberating" intellectual development within Western history that can be both baptized and integrated into the life of the Church?Or, is it a destructive cultural and political force that thwarts the desire for transcendence?Theologian Tracey Rowland believes the latter description of liberalism -- an intellectual tradition derivative of the epistemology and moral, political and economic philosophy of the various European Enlightenments in the 18th century -- better understands the phenomenon, and believes Benedict XVI shares at least some elements of this diagnosis. The encounter with liberal culture, she says, may be one of the central themes of his papacy....In the 19th century Lord Acton popularized the idea that Thomas Aquinas was the first Whig, that is, the first proponent of a modern, post-Enlightenment concept of politics. Thus "Whig Thomism" refers to an intellectual project that seeks to locate the genesis of the liberal tradition in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and to synthesize elements of the Liberal tradition, particularly those provided by the Scottish Enlightenment, to classical Thomism....[Those who disagree] are very broadly described as Augustinian Thomists for the want of a better label because, in a manner consistent with St. Augustine's idea of the two cities, they reject the claim of the liberal tradition to be neutral toward competing perspectives of the good and competing theological claims.While the Whigs argue that liberalism is the logical outgrowth of the classical-theistic synthesis, the Augustinian Thomists argue that the liberal tradition represents its mutation and heretical reconstruction, and they tend to agree with Samuel Johnson that the devil -- not Thomas Aquinas -- was the first Whig....The Whigs want to baptize the current international economic order, while the Augustinians take a more critical approach, arguing that there are economic practices characteristic of this order that cannot be squared with the social teaching of the Church....Benedict has also been strongly influenced by the Augustinian principle that faith is the door to understanding. He has said that he believes that a kind of memory, of recollection of God, is etched in man, though it needs to be awakened.His Augustinian pedigree is also manifest in his interest in the transcendental of beauty and his understanding of the catechetical importance of language and symbols and the relationship between matters of form and substance.So much of the liturgical mess of the last 30 years has been brought about by philistines who want to dumb down the language of the liturgy, replace symbolic gestures by lay people explaining what Father is doing -- as if we are all uncatechized Martians -- and gutting liturgical language of its poetic dimensions.Even secular linguistic philosophers argue that form and substance are inseparable -- that if we change language, we also in some sense change the way that people think. Pope Benedict is onto this, along with Francis Cardinal George of Chicago, and liturgical scholars such Aidan Nichols, OP, Monsignor Peter Elliott, Stratford Caldecott of the Center for Faith and Culture in Oxford, and Alcuin Reid, OSB....From an Augustinian point of view, the biggest problem with liberalism is its claim to be theologically neutral or indifferent toward different religious traditions. Quite a long list of scholars are coming to the view that the liberal claim to theological neutrality is bogus. This list includes Anglicans associated with the radical orthodoxy circle and scholars with a more Baptist-oriented theological background.It is not a position limited to so-called conservative or ultra-montanist Catholics. Indeed most postmoderns would agree with this criticism of the liberal tradition. Pope Benedict has made it clear that Catholics should not be persuaded by the liberal rhetoric to believe that in order to be good citizens they must bifurcate themselves into public and private halves.He has observed that secularism is itself an ideology, a kind of religious position that presents itself as the only voice of rationality. He sees these views as posing a challenge to the dominant political cultures of contemporary liberal democracies....to answer your question about culture and theology, the territory of the theology of culture is very broad. It ranges from the morality of different institutional and social practices, including practices within political institutions, to questions about the propriety of different types of music for liturgical use and questions about the role of language in the process of evangelization.For example, should we adopt the language of hostile intellectual traditions when presenting the Church's teachings? And what principles should be applied when discerning which of the "spoils of the Egyptians" to plunder?Pope Benedict has observed that the Church is its own cultural subject for the faithful, which is a further indication that he is not inclined to follow the pastoral strategy of accommodating the Church's culture to whatever happens to be fashionable in the contemporary Western world.In a recent address to the Knights of Columbus, Cardinal Stafford said that every world religion is trembling before the advances of American pop culture. I think that Pope Benedict would agree with this assessment and that he understands that the Church, in a sense, needs to be the mother of culture. She needs to put life back into culture, so that people can be edified and experience self-transcendence....In his book "The Spirit of the Liturgy," Benedict made the point that the sole purpose -- not the major purpose, but the sole purpose -- for the liberation of the Jews from Pharaoh was that God wanted them to be able to worship according to his prescriptions.Thus, I would say that for Benedict the most important question about any culture is, where does liturgy stand within this culture? Is it the highest good? Are we dealing with a liturgical city? Or are we dealing with a culture which is driven by economic factors? Who are the gods of this culture? What is the dominant vision of the human person? How are the sick and vulnerable treated?...In the same work, Benedict said that law and ethics do not hold together when they are not anchored in the liturgical center and inspired by it.He also made the point that every society has its cults; even the decidedly atheistic, materialistic systems create their own forms of cult. He comes very close to the position of scholars such as Catherine Pickstock and William T. Cavanaugh who have argued that in contemporary Western society the market has replaced the Eucharist as our object of adoration. ...Karl Polanyi expressed the position well when he wrote that a "natural order" is one in which the economy is embedded in social relations, rather than one in which social relations are embedded in the economic system, making society a mere adjunct to the market.By making the test that of the place and nature of liturgy within a culture Benedict is also taking a very Augustinian position. Augustine would say that what we adore is a sign of what we love, and what we love is a declaration of our membership card of one of the two cities -- the city of God or the city of Man. (http://zenit.org/english/) Code: ZE05072529